HOMEcoming – Summer Highlights and upcoming shows

HOMEcoming…

Often summer is different. For many of us we are fortunate enough to have breaks, to travel, to experience some big or small shifts in the routines of work and daily life. For some, summer marks the time between an old chapter and a new one. And then, September calls us back to task, calls us HOME.

I hope your summer was all you hoped it would be and it left you recharged for the coming fall.

SBDP Summer Highlights:

SummerFeast – I choreographed site-specific pieces on SBDP performers as well as dancers from Dance Brigade and Laytonville. The work was inspired by air and water — how essential they are to health and survival, and how humans can tunnel-vision in their habitual pursuits, ignorant to the ways their actions contribute to the polluting of those elements. Illustrated by dancing with black umbrellas and white powder in an old barn, on golden-dry hillsides, and in, on and around a jungle gym of water storage tanks surrounded by scrubby oak trees.

UUCB – Rose and I carried the theme forward in a liturgical dance piece created for First Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley’s Water Ceremony. To cross the desert, the water had to trust the air, accept help, and be willing to transform.

Sarah Bush and Rose Huey at UUCB. Photo by Sarah Bush

PFDM – Corey Action and I taught the Pride Freedom Dance Movement flashmob to all ages of dancers as part of Spectrum Queer Media’s “Revolve” arts festival for Oakland LGBT Pride.

Sarah with Kin Folkz and crew at Oakland PridePhoto by Bill Hamilton-Holway

Between teaching and projects, the rest of my summer moments filled my creativity bank. A trip to the mountains was like a return to spring — lush green hillsides blanketed with quilts of wildflowers and patches of snow. I delighted in time spent viewing, discussing, and writing about art — floating down the musical time-space stream of a mind-blowing Meshell Ndegeocello concert; reveling at the poignant and humorous “Black Odyssey” glittering under the night sky at Cal Shakes; and finally seeing “I Am Not Your Negro” and reading Twyla Tharp’s book! Photographer Sally Mann’s rich memoir “Hold Still” and Oakland Museum’s Dorothea Lange exhibit, illuminated for me these artists’ techniques for distilling complex stories into a single image while also conveying emotional tone — powerful tools to bring to the reworking of HOME as we close out SBDP’s 10th Anniversary season.

Mark your calendars!

Follow @sarahbushdance on social media to meet the incredible cast of multi-generational dancers and learn more about the production.

The perfect venue! What looks like an ordinary house is, in fact, Shawl-Anderson Dance Center: a home for multi-generational dance in the Bay Area since 1958.
Photo by Lisa Harding

It’s the Equinox, the balance point, tipping from summer into fall. May the balance of work and play, effort and rest, discipline and spontaneity, quiet and community catch you and carry you into the cozier seasons.

Welcome HOME,

Sarah

Photo by Sarah Bush

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